Parsad

This must be in the sarcasm mode. I'm guessing the "raspberry" at the end gave it away! ;D Cheers!

Perhaps the horrendous 20 year result is why Jim resorted to those "Fairfax is a zero" comments. Lessthan, don't you know that negative correlation is a valuable service he provides to his institutional clients. Along with providing room and board for Spitzer's hookers during the summer months! ;D And don't forget the liquidity he adds to markets that would normally be trading in bubble territory. Not sure how the world managed without him and Herb Greenberg. Even Batman wouldn't be able to nail down frauds like Fairfax, but Chanos and Greenberg did it! That Prem Watsa is one evil dude. You know Prem even had a website at one point talking about how evil he was. Some people suggested that there was a coordinated attack against Fairfax, but everyone knows Prem just orchaestrated the whole thing because he had to hide all the flaws in Fairfax's business model. You know he was leveraged and had too much in recoverables. Not enough cash...I think he was playing the horses or something. The really smart investors always have enough cash. Then he got lucky with these credit default swap thingies and saved the company, otherwise Chanos, Greenberg, Eavis, Hempton, Gwynn and Taylor would have all been right. He's one smart, evil dude! But his ponzi scheme will come to an end one day. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not ten years from now, maybe not when Prem has passed on and left this world...but some day...you watch, someday Fairfax will prove to be a fraud! Ppphhhhtttt! Cheers!

That's because being short is not an natural investment position to be in. The market increases by 6-7% on average. Just to break even, he needs to outperform the market by 6-7%, and that's before you even consider his costs. Thus the reason he shouldn't exist. He adds no value to his investors, and they could get the same results with fewer frictional costs by just buying ETF puts. Cheers!

...Chanos being the notable exception and even his returns are nothing close to what regular longs achieve. Have you ever seen Chanos' results? They are horrible. I had this debate a long time ago with those that supported Chanos, including Tilson. They said he's got a terrific negative correlation to the markets. Yet over 20 years between 1985 and 2005, he never made more than 2% or something. The average value investor would have done far better with minimal volatility and little in the way of frictional costs! The boring reality is that the community of short sellers is like most other groups of people - it's a diverse and heterogenous group. You have shorts who do their work quietly out of the limelight, those who are decent and honest value investors; you also have the unsavoury shorts who use media publicity to push their agenda. Of course, we see and hear much more of those who do their work publicly. I would venture to say that most shorts, including some here who do it, do it to hedge and reduce volatility in their portfolios; not because they are out to kill companies and bankrupt shareholders. I don't think most people have anything negative to say about short-sellers in general, only that there is a certain distastefulness in the way they make their money...from the death of a business. Both murdering thieves and funeral directors make their living from death, and no one is saying that the funeral director's work is the same as the thieve's. In fact, one could be considered noble and one incredibly cowardly. It's just unfortunate that the livelihood of both comes from the same outcome. Cheers!

Yeah, I don't think that is the same William Block. Cheers!

Interestingly enough, I knew I had heard the name before, including WAB Capital, but William Block is/was a shareholder in Chanticleer Holdings. 25,000 shares acquired back in 2005 when he became a director, but not sure when he left the board. I'm guessing it's the same one, as it's highly unlikely two William Blocks live at the same address in Pacific Palisades! ;D Cheers!

Is this the same William Block as WAB Capital. The address on the order is Lake Forest, Illinois, whereas WAB is based in Pacific Palisades, CA. Did they move to California? Cheers!

Terrific letter! Cheers!

Berkowitz's record CRUSHES CM's and Berk is managing a massive amount of capital How many Berkowitz's do you know? Cheers!

Hmmm, funny how the site is getting bombarded with spam memberships today. I've gotten more in one day than I've gotten in the last month. Don't be surprised if we see another hack! Cheers!

Hey, Eavis and his ilk just report the news ok! They don't write this stuff, they just report it. They didn't tell anyone to sell. They didn't go up to some senior citizen and say that Fairfax is a fraud and you should sell at $57 a share...Hempton did that! ;D Cheers!

Just curious. If you were an investor and started investing 10 years ago and had this kind of a record if you would call this very good? - The average investor looks after a portfolio less than $0.5M...he looks after $2B! - The average investor has no restrictions on concentration. - The average investor has little in the way of frictional costs (admin, staff, legal, accounting, audit, etc) - The average investor has a much larger universe of investments to choose from Cheers!

Parsad That's a great quote you came up with. I often find that wittyness like this is an indicator of intelligence. Not my quote. Mark Twain's quote. Perhaps, not as intelligent as you thought, and certainly not as witty as Mark Twain! ;D Cheers!

History never repeats, but it often does rhyme. I would say closer to 1977, rather than 1975. Cheers!

Gurufocus had a very good interview with Arnold Van Den Berg, founder of Century Management. He lumps Prem in with Ben Graham, Warren Buffett, John Templeton, Phil Fisher, Seth Klarman, et al. Very high praise from a legendary investment manager. Cheers! http://www.gurufocus.com/news/135105/gurufocus-interview-with-investor-arnold-van-den-berg-comments-on-csco-msft-tol-mdc-dell

Mainstreet Equity is one of the most levered real estate companies in Canada with a fair amount of exposure to Vancouver. I've said for a while this sucker is going to blow if rates rise or the market turns. Cheers!

A serious and not facetious question. What did Greenberg do to Fairfax to manipulate it? I was under the impression that his analysis was just wrong. We are all wrong at some point in time. I'd appreciate if you could point out where Greenberg tried to intentionally manipulate/mislead. When both he and Jim Chanos called Fairfax a "fraud" in front of 400+ hedge fund managers at the very first Value Investing Congress in New York. Is that just an error? Also, when I asked him if he read any of Fairfax's 10-Q's or 10-K's before writing his articles, he said "no, that he relied on information provided by two very good sources who had read them." If your suggestion is that Greenberg had no direct correlation in manipulating Fairfax stock, then you may very well be correct. At the very least though it would make him a culpable idiot assisting those that did manipulate the stock. Maybe that's why he's not in the lawsuit. Perhaps Muddy Waters is in the same category and was assisted with their research by those also interested in manipulating Sino-Forest. Block apparently is relying on research that his "accounting expert" provided. There was a large short position developing before he published his report. Several analysts or employees of firms have now come out and stated that they were aware or approached to participate in the growing short position. Finally, the usual culprits are coming out of the woodwork. Joe Weisenthal is the latest, and I would guess it won't be long before Bethany MacLean, Peter Eavis, Gary Weiss or Tracey Conen jump on the bandwagon. Cheers!

Further, I think many on this board are doing themselves an extreme disservice dismissing all short reports immediately just because of who the author is or who the author is associated with. Why not look at the content of the report and dispute it there? Two points I want to make Given2invest: 1) The rules for short-selling are different than for those that are long. Short sellers are still not required to file their short positions. I've been screaming for this for years, and still, shorts are not required to file if they have a short position greater than 5% of a company. Even the rules, and I probably would have no problem with even SAC or Kynikos. At least then investors have a clear idea of everyone's interest in the success or demise of a company. 2) How is it that both Herb Greenberg and John Hempton had involvement with Block? Of all the people in the world that could have been associated with this report and the CNBC interview, how is it that these two were the ones? You mean there weren't any other hedge funds, journalists or institutions that would have been interested. I think it says something about a person by who they associate with. Cheers!

Short sellers aren't manipulating gods. They can't just put out some research and bankrupt a company over night. The company will run into problems if the research is true, but isn't that what's supposed to happen? If this logic were true in the stock market, then nobody would ever publish any research publicly. Someone gets a case wrong and that means they are wrong for the rest of there lives? I guess Dexter Shoes makes Buffett a terrible investor. I'm assuming your batting average is perfect. Did I say that all short-sellers were bad? I listed four names that have been involved in various coordinated short attacks, not a general blanket statement of all short-sellers. C'mon, how many vulnerable companies were driven out of business by short sellers? Really. Name one. And don't give me a crummy company that had their access to capital spiget turned off because of a short and went bankrupt. I don't want a name of a company that had problems, a short pointed them out, and then went belly up. They shouldn't of had problems, and they shouldn't have relied on the world just extending and pretending. The only time a short can even "cause" a bankruptcy is when they are a financial services firm/leveraged firm that needs access to capital to survive. I, too, challenge you to find me examples of a company that has gone belly up that shouldn't have in hindsight - that's a real company, something over $500 Million in market cap at peak. How about Fairfax? When the stock was hammered to $57, where exactly where they supposed to get financing once the spigets were turned off? Fairfax would not be around today if it wasn't for Cundill, Longleaf & Markel. Coordinated attacks happen all the time. Insider trading happens all the time. How about Dendreon? Their drug would not be around today. In regards to him marketing/selling his report before he published it, so what? If I had smoking gun evidence of a fraud of a multi billion dollar company I would absolutely want to make as much money as I could before showing the evidence to the world. Why is that bad? That's the industry we are in. The way Block was going to get paid was to sell his research. Releasing it on the internet once the sales were over is not in the least shady, nothing different than someone posting a report on seekingalpha after pumping their ideas in a newsletter the week before. It's up to the market how they want to interpret the report. Well, actually not true. He has a very large short position to begin with. He could have simply taken on institutional clients, rather than release his report early to those institutions. Would that have not been more ethical? If he released his report early to select funds, then why did he just not say so when contacted by the reporter? There is a certain sense of improrpriety in that behavior, and he chose not to disclose that. No one was asking for names, just if it was true or not. Cheers!

But Parsad, how do you reconcile the fact that the amount of frauds Hempton, and especially Greenberg, have reported on or taken negative stances on out number the amount of legitimate companies they mistakenly thought were frauds by a large factor? I just don't get how saying Hempton/Greenberg are involved lessons the likelihood of fraud. If they've uncovered more fraud than they've been wrong on, then if they're involved the odds of fraud go up right? Isn't that just basic math? There is 30 correct frauds for every Fairfax in Greenberg's career. Wouldn't the fact that their fraud batting average is well over .500% make the odds that Sino is a fraud higher? Isn't that like saying it's ok if a few innocent men receive the death penalty, since the bulk of them are guilty? There are two views on Hempton, Greenberg, Chanos, Cohen et al: 1) They use all their resources to uncover fraud, and they've done a good job at catching many. 2) They use all their resources to coordinate short attacks and drive vulnerable companies out of business. Take your pick. I believe there were many people who were also sympathetic to Hitler when he was alive. Time tells a different tale! Cheers!

Hi Rjstc, Need to elaborate on the post, or I'll have to delete it. Kind of want the original posts to have at least a thesis or reason why something is a good investment in this section. Otherwise it belongs in the General Discussion area. Thanks!

Hempton was the analyst working for Platinum Asset Management in Sydney, Australia, that originally initiated much of the accounting stories around Fairfax. He contacted numerous people, including shareholders of Fairfax, telling them to sell their shares in the company. He was also showing up on message boards under aliases, including the old MSN BRK Message Board, and telling us about things that suddenly showed up the next day or week in articles, reports, etc. Hempton was also talking to John Gwynn, the Morgan Keegan analyst who wrote many negative reports on Fairfax, including the notorious $4B under-reserved calculation that was subsequently retracted. Gwynn was fired from Morgan Keegan after it was found he released his report early to Kynikos Associates and SAC Capital. Hempton was also one of the sources in articles regarding Fairfax that were written by Peter Eavis, Herb Greenberg and Fabrice Taylor. Deepcapture also covers John Hempton in a couple of their articles. You can find them on their website. Cheers! http://www.deepcapture.com/introducing-john-hempton-the-plunderer-from-down-under/ http://www.deepcapture.com/the-word-on-thestreetcom/

As I said before, I have no idea if TRE is a fraud or not, but there are a number of things that have occurred that strike me as particularly fishy. - The way the report was marketed to hedge fund before going public - The particular miscreants involved in some aspect or another (Herb Greenberg & John Hempton) - The tone of the report...much of it was assumptions about what the value of the assets would be if a trustee liquidated TRE after being found to be a fraud I'm waiting to see exactly which hedge funds were on the bandwagon. I would bet my life that we would be quite familiar with some of the names and personalities. Cheers! http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-07/muddy-waters-pre-marketed-sino-forest-report-to-hedge-funds-dundee-says.html

What's probably more important, is the character, conduct and integrity of men... Yup, and he's got that in spades! Cheers!

Article from Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-07/ex-sac-capital-manager-tells-jury-he-traded-on-tips-18-times-1-.html Cheers!